Daily Digest 11/17 – We Are In Another Tech Bubble, What Started The California Fires?

by DailyDigest

Economy

Flattening growth trajectories may not seem like such a big deal, but they do provide a peak into the often-tenuous association between perception and reality for technology. Indeed, this relationship has puzzled economists as much as investors. A famous example arose out of the environment of slowing productivity growth in the 1970s and 1980s [here] which happened despite the rapid development of information technology at the time.

The new memetic tribes share, to varying degrees, a few characteristics. Most are “unscrupulously optimistic”: They see social problems as soluble through large-scale adjustment. They see themselves as spokespeople for larger groups, whether that be “regular people” or “the marginalized”. At the same time, they see their existence, or their prime value, as under threat. They do battle both online and off. And crucially, their memetic warfare is just as much about firing up members and creating converts out of non-combatants as it is about winning particular battles.

The Iranian rial has been in a nosedive this year, largely due to the Trump administration's decision to reimpose sanctions against Tehran after the White House abandoned the Iran nuclear deal. Many Iranians have reportedly rushed to buy gold, foreign currencies and precious metals to protect their savings, as the rial is estimated to have plummeted by around 70%.

If you're not a member of the force and have a spare $150,000, the hoverbike could still be yours. Orders are open to civilians, but Segura-Conn cautions that buyers are screened to ensure they can handle the new tech. In the US, the hoverbike has met Federal Aviation Administration guidelines which mean you do not need a pilot's license to fly the vehicle.

The Bank of Japan has accumulated most of the enormous stockpile of assets since its governor, Haruhiko Kuroda, embarked on an unprecedented plan in 2013 to buy vast amounts of government bonds. Its goal was to push down interest rates, encouraging consumers and businesses to spend more money.

Only accredited investors, aka already rich people, can invest and make more money from their money. Instead of allowing people to decide what to do with their own cash, regulators think the bus driver, the teacher, and the dock worker are too stupid to invest, so we better protect them from themselves.

"The Commission assesses unequivocally that the NDS is not adequately resourced," the report says, while adding that "available resources are clearly insufficient to fulfill the strategy's ambitious goals, including that of ensuring that DOD can defeat a major power adversary while deterring other enemies simultaneously."

A recent study by my colleagues and I revealed bitter taste receptor genes that are responsible for the perception of caffeine, quinine and a human-made bitter substance propylthiouracil (PROP). This latter molecule has the same bitterness as Brussels sprouts (for those of us who can taste it).

The majority of retail biometrics projects in the U.S. so far, however, are focused on loss prevention and violence prevention, FaceFirst CEO Peter Trepp tells Biometric Update. After more production roll-outs of that application, different ones will eventually follow, he expects, but not right away.

The news is especially concerning for officials as Sichuan is the top swine-producing region in China — a country that produces half of the world's pigs with a current population of around 500 million swine.

Although the disease poses no direct danger to human health, its arrival and spread in China have increasingly threatened the pork industry, with major potential impact on supplies and prices in coming months.

“The number of sick people is increasing every day,” the health department release said. “Twenty-five people have been to the hospital for medical support. Staff serving the shelters have also been sick.”

The Enloe Medical Center in Chico has seen several norovirus patients shelters that were “acutely ill,” said Susie Benson, manager of Infection Prevention and Control at the hospital.

The state's previous social studies standards listed three causes for the Civil War: sectionalism, states' rights and slavery, in that order. In September, the board's Democrats proposed listing slavery as the only cause.

"What the use of 'states' rights' is doing is essentially blanketing, or skirting, the real foundational issue, which is slavery," Democratic board member Marisa Perez-Diaz, from San Antonio, said at a Tuesday board meeting.

But there is a chance that your lucky day will never come — that you’ll become one of the 20 Americans who die each day waiting for an organ. Indeed, forces that improve American health in other ways threaten to make the shortage of transplant organs even more acute: Safer vehicles cut into supply; longer life spans exacerbate demand. Even though 58 percent of adults in the United States have registered as donors, demand still outpaces supply and most likely always will.

So far, much of the metals pouring down from Silver Valley has settled innocuously on the bottom of the lake, undiffused in the overlying water. But the pollution is a ticking time bomb. Coeur d’Alene’s rapid development is loading the lake with nutrients from septic systems, lawn runoff, and logging activity, among other sources. Nutrients promote plant growth, which depletes the water’s oxygen supply. When the water becomes sufficiently anoxic—depleted of saturated oxygen—the metals will dissolve and flux upward into the water column, turning the lake into a toxic sink of liquefied arsenic, cadmium, lead, and zinc.

The tremendously destructive Woolsey Fire has been widely reported as beginning “near” the Santa Susana Field Laboratory (SSFL or Rocketdyne), but it appears that the fire began on the Rocketdyne property itself. Cal Fire identifies the fire location as E Street and Alfa Road, a location that is in fact on SSFL. It was recently reported that the “Chatsworth electric substation” experienced a disturbance 2 minutes before the fire was reported, but that substation is in fact on SSFL, near that location. A photograph posted on Twitter from KCAL9’s Stu Mundel shows the fire starting Thursday afternoon near the same location, which is only about 1,000 yards away from the site of the 1959 partial nuclear meltdown of the Sodium Reactor Experiment (SRE) reactor.

Public figures talk and act as if environmental change will be linear and gradual. But the Earth’s systems are highly complex, and complex systems do not respond to pressure in linear ways. When these systems interact (because the world’s atmosphere, oceans, land surface and lifeforms do not sit placidly within the boxes that make study more convenient), their reactions to change become highly unpredictable. Small perturbations can ramify wildly. Tipping points are likely to remain invisible until we have passed them. We could see changes of state so abrupt and profound that no continuity can be safely assumed.

Even a tiny pebble can be an important clue. On which side was it blackened by heat? What’s the condition of the soil below the fire at the place it started? An electrical charge from a high-voltage power line, for example, can solidify sand with a telltale signature. Then investigators look at things that were touched by the flames but not destroyed.

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